Last month, Jody Barkley of Kennedy Heights held a memorial service for her husband, Ardell, at her neighborhood recreation center. She wanted a place for his friends to pay their respects and mingle. There had been no funeral. Jody had donated Ardell’s body to his alma mater, Ohio State University.

The event lasted five hours. Jody said more than 500 people came.

Cincinnati attorney and former federal magistrate Bob Steinberg, a friend of 20 years, was one of them.

"There were hundreds of people there from all walks of life," Steinberg said. “They had a microphone and people would come and talk about their experiences with Ardell. He was basically the kind of person that was just a good, solid friend.”

Some knew Ardell as "Veep" (after Alben Barkley, Truman's former vice president). Many people know Ardell because he sold Fords for more than three decades in greater Cincinnati, mostly at the John Nolan dealership in Kennedy Heights. He grew up in a small African-American community in East End. He went to Moeller High School (Class of 1968), where he was a baseball star. He was good enough to earn a scholarship to Ohio State. He played Roy Hobbs amateur baseball and won a World Series with his team when he was in his 40s.

And, he led a team of mostly Orthodox Jewish boys to an undefeated season and Knothole Championship. Wait! What? More on that later.

Jody met Ardell in 1982 at John Nolan Ford, when she came in thinking about a lease. Ardell ended up selling her a blue 1982 Ford Escort. They fell in love and got married. It was a mixed marriage. He was an African-American Catholic; she a Caucasian Jew. Neither was particularly active in their faiths, though they were members of the Mayerson Jewish Community Center in Amberly Village.

That’s where Ardell made his mark as coach of the Mayerson JCC Blue Jays.

“I forget when I started playing, but I was too young,” said Dan Steinberg, 23, who remained friends with Ardell for life. “He was everything. He was like the first real coach we had. You run into a lot of people who say ‘yes’ and baby you, but Ardell treated us like we were athletes.”

More specifically, Mayerson JCC Sports and Recreation Director Mike Creemer told me that Ardell could be tougher on the boys than their parents, and he drilled into them the fundamentals of the game -- how to play ball the right way. Ardell expected the boys to be young men and treated them as young men.

Dan had to emphasize to me how extraordinary this was. A “middle-aged black guy” coaching a team of boys who would stop, pick up their Yarmulke and kiss it if it fell on the ground while they ran between bases.

“He really knew how to direct people no matter who they were,” Dan said. “You have to be a really special person to lead kids from a community not known for athletics, to turn kids like that into an undefeated sports team.”

Dan, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, said he believes Ardell’s influence helped him and his teammates be more enlightened about race relations, likening the experience to how a child can easily a foreign language.

“The diversity thing is huge. When you get exposed to that so early, it’s like you learn about it and its almost impossible to develop any negative racial tendencies,” he said. Dan is seeking to open a boxing gym with his brother, Matt, in Cleveland in two years. He will pass on the lessons he learned from Ardell to others, he said.

“Ardell was very happy and comfortable in his black skin and the whole black culture,” Jody, his wife, said. “But the interesting thing that I learned from the get-go is whenever he was asked to identify what race he was. He always wrote ‘human.’”

Meanwhile, Creemer is facing the first season without Ardell in a long time. “It is really such a devastating loss, both personally and professionally,” Creemer said.

Ardell was planning to coach this year, Creemer said. He will miss Ardell's encyclopedic knowledge of every player’s skills and their tendencies. That’s what stood out in strategy meetings. “What it shows you is he rolled it around in his head all the time, not just at the game or at practice.'

There was also something else, too. Ardell learned enough Hebrew talk to his kids on the field, a code that was a decidedly competitive advantage.

Ardell’s heart stopped shortly after midnight on March 23 while he was hospitalized for an illness.

“I loved the guy. I thought he had really solid values,” Bob Steinberg said. “And he passed them on to a lot of kids, including my own kids.”

Enquirer Columnist Byron McCauley is also a member of the editorial board. Call him at (513) 768-8565. Connect with him on Twitter: @byronmccauley. He writes about people and places behind the news and other things that strike his fancy.